Sunday, January 22, 2012

I'm not a big do it yourselfer, but I do have a lot of blank spaces on my walls. Instead of going out and hitting up antique stores and thrift shops for posters I might like, I decided to make something for like the first time in my life.

I started out running down to Hobby Lobby and wondered around the store for a good half an hour. While there, Eden took a crap that nearly clogged the toilet. It's not really important for the story, I was just proud of the little gal.

Just my luck, Hobby Lobby was having a sale on Mod Podge so I stocked up. Got some paint brushes and some foam brushes, acrylic black and metallic white paint and some canvases. We sprung for some stencils (four different fonts in 4 different sizes) and checked out to the tune of about $50. Not bad.

We went to dinner at McKay's Taphouse in Richland. (Strongly recommend. The bad review there was written on their busiest night so I feel bad for the guy, but it's really not that bad. Lots of beer on tap!) and proceeded home. I wanted to stop by Adventures Underground (yeah, I don't have a link for that one. Sorry guys) but they had closed early. I made do with what I had.

I chose Kurt Vonnegut because he also had doodles in all of his books and I didn't want my thing to be boring.

If you're brave, you can simply cut out what you want from the books directly. I'm not brave. I made copies. I didn't like the stark white of the ink on the printer paper, so I threw it in a tea/coffee bath to stain it a bit, then tossed it in the oven for about 30 seconds on 170.

Tea Bath

In the Oven

After I made about 30 copies of things, I Mod Podged them to the canvas. I waited for it to dry (took about 30-40 minutes) and stenciled my quote on. Once I get a little better at stenciling, this project will be a lot more fun.

I'm going to head down to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore today. Rumor has it they've got some old cabinet doors for really cheap and the texture of them will be fun to play with.

Friday, January 13, 2012

I received a call from my mother earlier this week saying we'd be lucky if my grandmother made it through the week. Well, Tuesday night she left this world to move on to... well who knows.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time at my grandma's house. She had cable and that was fucking awesome. She also cooked bacon in the microwave and played Go Fish with me. Then my grandpa died and my family thought it best to move her to a retirement community. Since then, it's all been down hill.

I'm upset about losing my grandma, but her death came at nearly the one year anniversary of the death of my friend, Luke. This puts me in a big 'fuck the world' mood. My work gave me some time off to get over myself, so what do I do? I laid on the couch on Wednesday and pouted. Thursday I went to work and was sent home. I was pissy. I needed something to do. I decided to paint.

When we moved in, the house was a kind of white bookmarked for hospitals and mental institutions:

It came with the stains from what ever the last guy had hanging included for free. What a steal. I got some paint samples from Lowes and decided to see how they looked:

They started growing on me. So I painted:

And now half my living room is done. The colors remind me of a lobby or a waiting room of some sort, but it's a huge improvement over the white there was before.

Poor Nathan had to put up with my emotional break down, and I'm sure there will be more to come. At least he's making sure I'm eating and putting on pants every once in a while.

Monday, January 9, 2012

I'm a procrastinator at heart. Here I sat, with an english paper due in less than half an hour, looking over at my husband. "Dude." He looked at me with disapproval as I finished my thought, "I seriously want to start a blog right now."

"Finish your home work, then we'll talk. I'll show you how to set it up." Half the night was already gone with my only progress towards my paper making it on time was opening up Microsoft Word. I scowled at him and threw something badly written together in honor of Christopher Hitchens, a man I knew nothing about but I felt obligated to pay tribute to for the secular humanist in me, and hit submit on my assignment.

Then poor Nathan directed me to Blogger.com. I spent the rest of the night and half of the next day trying to think of a name. Something about Zombies? Nah. Something with 'Eden' in the title. A acknowledgment of my three year old spawn? I'm not a stay at home mom who loves scrap booking. In a short sighted effort to be clever, Remedial Chaos was born.

I edit the font. It has to be just right. And that back ground color... well that can take hours to perfect. You know how it can be. Then the page is loaded and the website knows to end on the hardest page: "Post now!" Yeah... No. I made dinner. I watched a few important episodes of 'Being Human.' I took the time to learn what Pinterest is. I smoked most of Nathan's cigarettes. I decided to go to bed and try it again today.

And the page stayed empty. To justify my actions, I take my one hundred percent original plan to my third time reactivated Facebook account. "Pay attention to me!" I type. "I'm hopping on the bandwagon and starting a blog!! Tell me I'm lame!"

I received some *face palm* responses. But their lameness gave me the jump I needed to actually move forward and type. 'Wow, people I care about must care about me! That's how the world works!'

Procrastination means putting it off as long as possible. But it still gets done. So here I am...